Preservation, we think about something staying the same. Yet preservation changes things. So thats the focus were going to aim at today. In the context of open space lands here in the u. S. Where often theres this presumption that Public Ownership is the best way to protect a landscape. We even see the miniseries by ken burns from a ways back on National Parks. It was called americas best requested which was taken from a quote from wallace stigner. That natural spaces that have trails for hiking and sightseeing and so on are representative of pure, pristine nature thats had some boundary put around it and its been kept a same like a vase in museum. Just kind of static and never changing. That literally is part of the founding legislation for the National Park service which was written and passed by congress in 1916. The Park Service Just had their centennial last year, lots of hoopla. And so you can see that their fundamental purpose is to conserve scenery and provide for the enjoyment as well as leave it unimpaired. The impression you get from this language is that parks are unimpaired and staying the same through generations in time. So what im going to sort of, what my research has focused on for years and that unchangingness thats hiding thats occurring as places are preserved. As a little backdrop, this will be familiar to some of you from earlier in the semester. This idea that all ecosystems is from nancy langston, environmental historian and mentor of mine. She states very clearly that all eco systems are the product of history, including both their natural and cultural or social history. So one of the things i do in my work is looking at how looking how landscape change over time can really tell us something about the ideas that people have about landscape over time and how those ideas change with changing times. So a lot of this is really underlining both why understanding environmental history is important to begin with, but then also sort of seeing the current state of the ecosystem, how and why it got there from the social or cultural side as well. So were going to start with just again, review from my class. This concept of landscape. Landscapes are you sort of inherently formed by interactions, formed by people in place so theyre always about this interaction. Pierce lewis wrote there are unwitting biographies. Essentially, by shaping the land, by being influenced by whats on the land and what is possible there, come on in. Theres lots of seats in the front. We essentially write our own autobiographies in the landscape without realizing were doing it. So were leaving traces, all the ideas we have, the ways in which we interact with the land, all those things. And for those of us who are researchers and interested in studying environmental history, we can then come along, look at the landscape and read something as if it were a book or another kind of text. We can read something about whos been here and what theyve been doing from looking at the landscape and how it changes over time. We may use the term natural landscape or cultural landscape. I always make the assertion that all landscapes are both. There is no purely cultural landscape, although Downtown Manhattan has plants growing places and pigeons flying everywhere and theres a lot of nature in the middle of a city and similarly the most remote pristinelooking wilderness has a lot of cultural overlay, cultural management, et cetera, thats influencing what that place is like. Lastly, all landscapes are dynamic. Theyre always changing. Theres no way of holding them still the way we do with a vase in a museum. You can put the ming vase on a shelf and maybe have some nice climatecontrolled air and lighting for it and it will just stay pretty much the same for centuries. We cant do that with landscapes. Theres no way of holding them still. Theyre constantly shifting with climatic changes, ecological changes and with cultural and social changes. Thats really what im interested in looking at. And a prime example is National Parks. In the way that we often dont notice that landscape changes occurring because it happens so slowly. So many of us have visited the Yosemite Valley. This is a photo that i took when i was visiting there alongside the merced river. Its really striking to look at pictures of the same place over time. Again, i think the first week of this course we looked at some of these same images. This is the photograph taken from the same location near the merced river but taken in 1865 by carlton watkins. What you can see in it, a little difficult, the trees are in the way. You can see theres a big meadow in the back. Some coniferous trees, but a lot of oak trees and willows. Its a much more open landscape than what we see today. Similarly, we can look at paintings from the 1870s. This is by albert beerschtott. Hes done a little fancy footwork with the sides of the valley. They actually dont match up. If you look at a photograph today, youll realize this side is about five miles west of this side in his painting. But whats interesting about this painting is, again, its showing us the ecosystem of this landscape in the 1870s. Which again is meadows in oak woodlands with a few coniferous trees. A real contrast to the landscape we see today, which is almost all dark, coniferous forests. Not that one is better than the other or preferable but that the ecosystem here has changed enormously because this place was preserved. This is a place where native americans had lived for centuries and had been doing Landscape Management of their own, mostly through burning. Once that management was stopped and the place was protected, the ecological shifts started occurring. But those who visit today think, oh, this is what its always been like. Because we dont know the history. Thats part of what were going to be looking at today is trying to understand the ways in which parks change over time, how they change far more than we recognize, and how that helps us to understand whats going on with park protection. Other things that most of us take public parks for granted. In a way that most of us have grown up with parks in cities and National Parks to go visit. Theyre kind of part of our culture now, but thats fairly recent. Public parks are a novel intention, they evolved during the 1800 essentially out of both the admiration of wealthy estates, private estates in england where there would be sort of, oh, whats the tv show . The um downton abbey. Yes, thank you. I always forget words. Very downton abbeyesque. You have this huge estate with Rolling Hills and people strolling about, but most people couldnt visit those estates. They were privately owned by individual families. With an admiration for those kind of spaces, but here in the u. S. , this idea that we wanted that space to be more democratic, to be more open to the public rather than just private. They also evolved in some ways from using certain public spaces like cemeteries very informally for going for an afternoon walk. It seems odd to us now this you would sort of go strolling in a cemetery. They seem much more formal now. But back in the 1800s, especially in the 1830s through the 1860s or so that was a very common thing in a lot of large cities. It was pretty much the only open Space Available and so people would go out for a walk and just enjoy the view and the green grass and the stones. Sort of a combination of these very formal spaces that we didnt want to repeat here in the u. S. And these more informal uses. Similarly, preservation itself of Historic Buildings say was originally something undertaken by private wealthy individuals. George washingtons estate at mt. Vernon was protected by the mt. Vernon ladies association, a private organization. The idea that government should protect and preserve places was not part of our culture. Until the sort of late 1800. One of the people most responsible for that change was this guy, frederick law homestead. He was a Landscape Architect and park designer. He very famously designed central park in new york city. Ive got the original design here. Its a little hard to see, but from the 1860s. Essentially what he was doing at the time, this was actually not central in new york city. It was way out in the sticks. But he had the foresight to know that the city would grow up around the park and wanted to create a space of nature for sort of people to visit to just sort of stroll around and enjoy. This idea of sort of creating and designing a wilderness. This was not just a case of setting aside an already natural landscape and leaving it alone. Which is again what we tend to think of when we think of park protection. What he was doing was making nature out of what at the time was mostly old sheeps meadows. There actually is a big grassy area in central park called the sheeps meadow and thats why, because there were sheep on it. But you know, from this old image, literally moving earth around, planting trees, bringing nature in to a degree thats deeply, deeply designed. Has anyone been to central park in this room . A couple people. When youre there, it feels very natural. Ive got a picture here of new york city with central park today. Its completely forested. Theres sort of hills and dales. Theres lakes. Lots and lots of dense trees. A lot of little paths. It feels like youre in a pristine piece of new york forest thats just been left behind without any buildings, but almost every aspect of it with the exception of a couple of big granite boulders, all the hills, all the forests, all the lakes are all completely designed and, therefore, artificial. But we dont feel like theyre artificial. We interpret them as natural. As a natural space. And so thats really this idea that olmstead brought to his work was designing nature to in essence make it more natural or more natural seeming than what might have been there originally. He also was very he actually had a lot of nervous conditions himself as a young man and was ill a lot. He had this idea that nature could be sort of a therapy for people. That not literally sort of psychotherapy, but as a relief from sort of your stresses of ordinary daily life in an urban setting with all the noise and the sort of trains running by and all kinds of crowding. He thought what people need is this escape valve in a sense. To go and stroll around on sunday with your sweetheart on your arm enjoying a contem plate afternoon experience of nature. He wanted to to be a public space open to all classes, not just the wealthy. That was part of his ambition here. Yet the rules that he put in place for your behavior were much more geared toward middle class and upper class visitors than towards working people. You cant have a lot of noise. Theres no organized sports allowed. This is very much a version of nature thats contemplative and quiet and sort of strolling about. Whereas if youre a real working 9 00 to 5 00er, it twaent 9 00 to 5 00 back then. It was like 6 00 to 8 00. You have one day off to blow off steam so people want to play stick ball in the streets and drink beer and run around and none of that was allowed. So in essence this was created as a public space, but really privileged certain users over others. Were going to see these early ideas of how youre supposed to behave in a park, who the park is aimed toward, still carries through in a lot of our National Parks today. Theres a lot of presumptions that both these parks are open to everybody, but that there are particular ways youre supposed to behave and interact with nature when youre there and other ways are not appropriate. So youre not going to find socking fields in a National Park. Youre going to find hiking trails. Not everybody likes to go hiking. Too bad. So theres sort of this element to it as well. So olmstead starts off this idea of parks as designed nature. This gets combined with how do we get from these designed city parks like central park to the National Parks that we have. In some ways, the National Parks originated with a place that didnt become a National Park until much later, i think the 1940s or 50s, which is Niagara Falls in new york. Before a lot of western expansion really started bringing awareness of the big monumental western landscapes that we are familiar with, before that, the early 1800s, niagra falls was considered one of the most stunning Natural Landscapes that north america had to offer. It is pretty darn stunning. I have never been there. Ive just seen pictures, but its pretty great. After the erie canal opened up easier transportation in the new york area, it became it still doesnt seem fast to us. It would take at least two days to get from new york city to niagra falls, but that was instead of a week. So greatly easy. Greatly easier to get there and you get this big influx of tourists coming from new york and boston and sort of the urban cities wanting to go and visit niagara. Its this beautiful place, they go and have their photograph taken. I couldnt find a date for this picture, but its clearly sort of the late 1800s at some point, but one of the problems of niagara, heres the tourists alongside the beautiful falls having their photograph taken with a big view camera. One of the problems at Niagara Falls, though, was there werent any public controls the way we understand them now. Again, people just didnt have that cultural conception of government stepping in to control space in any way. And so what happened was youd get all of these little sort of tourist stands like we get in a lot of places today. Hey, were going to sell postcards. Pay me a dollar or five cents and stand here and get the best view. There would be photographers supplying their trade and so you got all this sort of messiness kind of messing up the scene. So what ends up happening is the grandeur of the falls gets messy. Theres little stands, theres people selling the equivalent of hot dogs and cotton candy today, kind of messing up the view. And a bunch of european visitors come to visit and they write criticism. They say, oh, these tacky americans, they would sell their grandmother to make a dollar. Theyre essentially ruining the view to have this sort of small scale entrepreneurial use. They just think its incredibly tacky. How dare they. This is a time when here in the u. S. , were kind of culturally sensitive. Were less than 100 years old as a nation, had recently sort of shaken off the influence of europe. Great britain specifically. Yet all cultural references are from europe. The writers we read, the painters we look at, all of the sense of high culture that we have is european. So theres this push, especially when the europeans are now criticizing us and saying, oh, theyre so tacky. Theres this push to try and say what do we have thats unique and different and shows how great the u. S. Is. And one of the things they start to focus on are the Natural Landscapes that especially the western u. S. Sort of reveals as people are moving west. And so niagra falls becomes essentially a negative example sort of what not to do. We dont want to mess things up the way we did there. So when Yosemite Valley here in california is, quote unquote, discovered by a battalion of military folks who are chasing some native americans up the merced river and sort of come out into this amazing valley and theyre stunned by this incredible scenery that they see. Yosemite valley is pretty unlike almost anywhere on earth with these huge Granite Cliffs just sort of dominating this thing. So to this young u. S. Culture at the time, these kinds of monumental, unique, stunning Natural Landscapes become symbolic of our National Pride. Of saying, hey, weve got something that those crazy europeans dont have. In fact you see a lot of descriptions of western landscapes as people are moving across the western territories and describing these places. Theyre often describing them in comparison to castles in europe or old ruins in rome and saying how much cooler, essentially, these places are. You could have some tumbled down castle or you could have this amazing rampart of stone and granite and theres all this sort of comparison going on. So nature takes on a new meaning of being symbolic of our youthful strength and vigor of our nation. It becomes very nationalistic to experience these kinds of monumental western landscapes. And its not just the landscape in this case. There was similar interest in the redwood trees, both the coast redwoods here in coastal california and the giant sequoias of the sierras. Its just symbolic of something our nation had that no one else had. Just the sheer size of these things. Theres all kinds of photographs of slicedthrough sequoia trees with people posing by them or standing on the stump and seeing how many people they can fit on as like a dance floor just saying look how gigantic this is. This is better than any tree youll find in europe. Its bigger and its taller and its what were doing thats great. The funniest thing for me about the giant trees is the botanists who are all about identifying species in sort of the early stages of biological science in the 1860s or so. They have this giant fight over what to call the sequoias with their latin name. The british botanists all wanted sequoia wellingtonia after wellington. The United States botanists wanted sequoia washingtonia. Instead, thankfully, sticked with sequoia gigantia. Which is more descriptive. Again, the descriptions of these places, this is a quote from surveyor Clarence King describing the giant sequoias in 1864. He writes no fragment of human work, broken pillar or sandworn image hath lifted over pathetic desert. None of these linked to the past as today with anything like the power of these monuments of living antiquity. So this is this idea that we have a past, we dont need europes past, we have our own and its this natural past, this natural history, thats better than anything europe has. So theres a lot of sort of nationalism being imbued in this. Why does nationalism matter . Its in part where the setting of National Parks comes from. Setting aside these landscapes to keep the symbolic scenery pretty and powerful and not sort of messed up the way niagara got messed up with these little shops and trinkets and so forth. Interestingly, its a little hard to see this map. The pink outline here is more or less the its actually a little smaller than the current yosemite National Park. The park thats labeled in green is the original reservation that was set aside, signed by lincoln in 1864. And as you can see, hopefully, from that map, all that was protected the original protected area was very small. It was just the valley. And literally sort of the view shed of the valley. So if youre standing on the valley floor like where i took those photographs earlier by the merced river, and youre looking up at the granite walls, the boundary of the protected area is the top of those walls. We dont care about the ecosystem, we dont care about the forest, we dont care about the overall sort of mountains and sort of large landscape. What were protecting here is the view. By making it into a public park. A governmentowned park, remember all of this land was public land to begin with. Part of the public domain, essentially claimed by the u. S. When we won the mexicanamerican war in 1848 and california became part of the union. So all that is being done is setting aside already publicly owned land, not allowing homesteaders to make claims in it, not allowing miners to come in and sort of mess it up, trying to keep it nice and tidy so that tourists can come and see this grand view and feel this nationalistic pride. The original proposal for setting aside yosemite did not come from the public at large, which is sort of how we think about parks today that theyre for us and by us and all that sort of democratic language. The original proposer was from one of the Steamship Companies that was bringing people from the east coast sort of around the horn and bringing people to california before the transcontinental railroad. That was the only way of getting here other than a few people coming over land. So it was the Steamship Company saying, hey, this is great. If you set this place aside, its really beautiful. Everyone will want to go visit it and theyll have to pay us by both steamship and then stagecoach to take them there, have them stay in our hotel that well build and then we take them back again. They pay us three times. This is great. So this is, you know it gets set aside. Mark david spence who you read some chapters from this week sort of described the Yosemite Valley protected area and the Mariposa Grove, which is further south somewhere, i dont think its on this map, he describes them as sort of powerful symbols of national unity. Theyre being established just as the civil war is coming to a close in 1864, at least they hope its coming to a close, and so they think this is going to be symbolic of our once again reunited nation and its strength and vigor Going Forward in time. So its really important as the public symbol, but then also theres this connection with private enterprise. First the Steamship Company in the case of yosemite, for every other National Park thats established between 1864 and 1916 when the National Park service itself is created, theyre all proposed, advocated for and then served by railroads. So again, the connection to tourism and to sort of industrial tourism, if you will, not mom and pop setting up a little shop and selling you tshirts, whatever the equivalent in 1900 of tshirts is, not that kind of tourism but really organized corporate tourism is part of the National Parks from day one. Its how they get established. Somebody has to go to congress and convince congress to pass this legislation. It doesnt just happen. And thats whos pushing them to do this. One of the other interesting things about the yosemite reservation is that theres a clause in the legislation that creates the park insisting that the protection be permanent. Theres sort of no point in setting something aside for this scenic grandeur unless were committing to protect it for all time. So it starts very early. In 1864, this idea that parks are going to stay the same. We have this static view. Sort of the sense that all of us have from looking at postcards or calendars, photographs or our own photographs if we go to yosemite and visit, of the view of what yosemite looks like. We dont think of that as being something that changes over time. In fact, if the park service ever moves like a campground or changes, you know, a scenic pull out, people get upset. Hey, thats not the one im used to. Now it looks different because im having to see it from a different angle. I ran an experiment with my environmental history class a number of years ago in the early days of digital photography. We didnt have instagram yet or facebook, we just had flickr. During one of our class breaks, i had them type into flickrs Search Engine yosemite and view. Had to pull up all the photographs tagged with those words and just play them as a slide show. I swear 90 of them were taken from exactly the same spot, which is one of the spots where the tour buses sort of take everybody through to whats called the tunnel view, if you know yosemite, up on highway 140 and looking back at half dome and el captain and sort of this very classic view that we all know. If a hotel is built in the middle of that or a great lightning bolt struck and cracked it in half, thats not going to happen, we would be upset because the thing we think of is unchanging, would change. Thats part of the idea, again, of preservation. This sort of natural landscape frozen in time and staying the same sort of for generations to come. One of the last aspects of yosemite specifically that i think is not as well understood, not only were they promoted in the early days, you know, sort of pitched to congress and then promoted by the railroads, but once you get the automobile being invented and also our lives changing in terms of the workweek getting shorter, weekends are invented, and people have more leisure time. The combination of these two things really transforms the National Parks. They become very auto oriented. You can see this in an old poster from the 1930s or 20s. Yosemites Mariposa Grove with a tree that just fell over in the winter storms this year with a car driving through the tunnel tree. This is a real transformation as we have more leisure. The Auto Industry expressly wants there to be places for us to go in our cars to go visit, because the more we drive cars, the more well buy gas. The more well buy new cars. This is very much sort of, again, a corporate enterprise. So in the middle of world war i when the National Park service itself was created to manage the parks that had already been created, they had this whole see America First campaign. You dont need to go to europe for your vacation. Go see America First. Get in your car or on the railroad and ride around and see the country that you live in. See the iconic landscapes. So parks were very even in these later days, were there expressly to inform us about what being an american was supposed to be and sort of expos us to these iconic Natural Landscapes that were supposed to fill us with National Pride and sort of a sense of where were coming from. What time is it . Were doing fine. And they did start coming. I just realized i skipped over. The numbers of yosemite visitors, its really telling to see how it climbs up. In 1855 are the first tourists entering Yosemite Valley even before it was created into a park. By 1863, just before it was set aside, 406 visitors arrived that year by steamboat and stage. Ten years later in 1875 they built hotels and a road. There were wagons and supplies coming in. Eventually the railroad connects the area. By 1916 when the park service is created, 14,000 visitors to Yosemite Valley in a year. Two years later in 1918 it had jumped to almost 27,000 nearly doubled because of the automobile. In fact, one of the biggest advocates for establishing the National Park service in 1916, again, not the general public at large like we tend to think but the aaa, the Automobile Industry was like say, hey, we need these parks, we need this agency so that people have places to go. So like i said, 1916, 14,000. 1918, 27,000. And in 1997 dont ask me why i dont have recent data. 4. 2 million almost all arriving by car. You know, the visitation to Yosemite Valley is completely insane and in fact, theres a lot of discussion about when does a park get too much visitation. Should we start restraining some people. But again, what i want you to really get from this is that parks even though we think of them as pristine natural spaces have always been intended for tourism. And specifically not for sort of the backpacking tourism we think of today, since the advent of rei and people go backpacking all the time or doing other kinds of extreme, getting into the wilderness kinds of recreation. These were really set up for very passive tourism. Driving around in your car and looking out the window and just kind of saying gosh, isnt that pretty, taking a picture with your kodak instamatic or now your iphone. Its kind of the same thing. Very tourist focused process. One of the other important aspects of National Parks is these places were not empty when they were set aside to make parks. Almost every single park in well, both the west and the east, but certainly the western parks, almost all of them were inhabited by native americans before they became parks. Part of the process of understanding the story of our National Parks is understanding the people who are displaced from parks in order that they become these sort of unchanging iconic natural scenery parks. Were going to talk more about wilderness in this class in a few weeks. But just to bring up the idea very briefly, theres been a lot of critique over the last few years, im someone who writes about this a lot myself, of how the concept of wilderness is very ethno17 particular. It tends to edit out the native peoples of the americas and sort of have this idea that before white people started showing up in the western landscape, it was pristine nature that was empty and uninhabited. An then we idealize them as little fragments of uninhabited places. Which is of course is not true. You had some reading from spence today. Arguing that uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved and the sort of type of landscape that was being preserved becomes he says sort of remade or made real in a way that it never was real before in the National Parks. You get these empty spaces that have only tourists running through them. Of course theyre not empty. Theres other people now. They are just tourists visiting but no longer anyone living there because we had to push those people out and edit them out of the story. In some cases they were literally edited out of the story in the sense they were relocated. Theres a real similar time frame for when the first National Parks are being created and when the first native American Reservations are being created. In many cases people are being taken out of a park space and put onto a reservation space, which is much less grand in terms of the scenery. But you know, it really overlooks the fact that not only were native peoples in place at the time but had been in these landscapes for in many cases millenia, for hundreds or thousands of years. And theres an interesting sort of quality. These are people who are living in Yosemite Valley as part of the Museum Exhibit in Yosemite Valley for decades. They were initially they tried to move the native people out of Yosemite Valley and then eventually they sort of let them back in but on the condition essentially that they live in their traditional ways as part of the display for the tourists. Not quite like animals in zoos but something close. Theyre on display. People come by and remark on, oh, look at those outfits theyre wearing, look at the things that theyre doing. Theyre there to be sort of seen by the tourists. I think one of the things thats curious about our relationship with nature as represented by the parks is how sort of the original anglo settlers and these railroads and all these folks that are coming into these landscapes cant really quite make sense of people who live in nature. Rather than looking at nature. Thats the difference of being yosemite being a place to live in and to rely upon the resources that are there and the way the native americans do, or is it being sort of a scene that you stand back and you look at. You go to the tunnel view which the tour bus takes you to and take your standard photograph or buy the postcard and get the view of the place. Its a very different relationship. Its not necessarily that one is better than the other. But theyre really not the same. I think that a lot of those early anglo settlers and developers couldnt understand this different way of interacting with nature. Theres even in the earliest writings theres a sense that indians living in parks arent adequately appreciative of the scenery. In an aesthetic way. Literally theres a doctor who is with the military group that first enters Yosemite Valley as theyre chasing some of them up the valley as part of this military campaign. And he kept a journal and while they were doing this expedition and he describes once they catch up with them and ask them questions through interpreters and so on. He refers to the resident indian sort of reverence of Yosemite Valley as being a spiritual place for them. He refers to as demonism. Its not christianity therefore its something terrible. That its a negative thing. Oddly he doesnt interpret that as the same kind of awe that he experiences in this place, even though you could argue that those are actually very much the same experience. Sort of seeing awe in the grandeur, having a sense of a Spiritual Connection to a landscape, have some similarity. But, you know, he just doesnt see the connection. In his account he wrote, in none of their objections made to the abandonment of their home as theyre being forced out was there anything said to indicate any appreciation of the scenery. He was like these people dont think its pretty. They keep talking about how theres deer and other resources and its a really comfortable place to live and they like it and their family has been here for a long time. Theyre not saying isnt it pretty. Therefore, they dont deserve to live here. Sort of the sense that youre supposed to have this aesthetic reaction to a natural landscape and just no room for any other kind. Therefore, these people dont belong and should be moved out. Which in todays parlance just seems very strange, right . Most of us like, no, of course those are two Different Things but at the time that seemed quite normal. Unfortunately, this idea of a National Park as natural scenery with wildlife, with rivers, with mountains, without people who are residents, has then been its become this National Park ideal that weve developed over time. The National Park service when it was created was managed to pardon me was created to manage these kinds of spaces. This is what it tends to presume parks are supposed to be like. And every time you and i go visit a park and keep seeing these Natural Landscapes that have no residents where our movements are choreographed through those spaces, when you get to the overlook at the tunnel view in yosemite you cant see the lodge or Curry Village or the campgrounds. Theyre hidden away amongst the trees. All we see is the empty natural scenery. So each time we visit, that gets reinforced. Thats what a park is supposed to be like. We similarly have exported this idea. A lot of National Parks in the developing world, in africa, south america and asia were created with the Environmental Movement in the 1970s and 80s replicated this idea. Started kicking their native inhabitants out and recreating these empty wildlife parks or nature parks for european and american tourists to come visit with their cameras. So we see this kind of pattern over and over again of often destroying the native cultures in the process or making them incredibly impoverished and forcing them into sort of more marginal existence around the edges of parks in order to create these kind of empty wilderness spaces. Again, theyre wonderful places. Theres nothing sort of oh, theres this terrible nature, its horrible. But we want to understand that they come at a cost. They come from removing people who are living in these places. Here again is you might have noticed in the previous picture, these people are standing around in front of tepees. This is not their natural, usual form of shelter. This is from the great plains. But its part of the american i think this photograph is from the 1920s. Its part of the sort of Popular Culture in the u. S. Of what indians are supposed to look like. What they actually look like is more like this in that area. They lived in the wooden structures, similar shape, totally different construct. You know, again, theyre not only made part of the display but sort of made to change how they are living to fit our ideas of what a native person is supposed to be like. So theres this real, you know, i think understanding that these National Parks, these wilderness spaces have come at a cost of moving people out, of changing them from being livedin nature to being this kind of iconic nature. So that sort of sierra history starting with yosemite moving on to creating the National Parks. What does this have to do with my work . This is my opportunity to talk a little about my own research here, since i just had a book out last year, hurray, which is about Point Reyes National seashore here in california, also part of the National Park system. Because its on a coastal area, its called a National Seashore but its owned and managed by the same agency. Its just a few miles west of here conveniently, so we can all go on a field trip some day perhaps. Its owned an managed since 1962 by the National Park service. If you look at their web page or the promotional material they put out, theyll tell you that it was created to protect wilderness and natural resources. Sort of a protected chunk of undeveloped california coastline. You get their little park map. Here you are. This is kind of the wild california coast that this place is supposed to be protecting. What you dont see very much information about at this park is what was it before it became a park. You know, with yosemite it was this native history that was sort of edited out of the landscape in the 1860s. This is made into a park in the 1960s. Is it different . Well so maybe different . Well sh well, not. It is a native history and because im not an archaeologist, and i dont have the history in that area, but as a historian, im more interested in the recent history of this place, and since the late 1850s, 60s, the point with the managing of the whole series of dairy ranches. This land was originally a mexican or actually, yeah, mexican land grant in the 1930s and as often happened here in california after we became part of the u. S. And became a state, there were a lot of the legal disagreements over who owned which pieces of land, and so those would go to court, and in many instances, including here, instead of either of the two parties fighting over the land, because of the legal fees were so high, the land ended up in the hands of the lawyers which is what happened here. Two brothers, i kid you not, their last name is shafter, and it seems appropriate, and one of them had a soninlaw, so you have James Shafter owned part of the land, and Charles Howard his soninlaw, and i forget what the o stands for but maybe olle ver shafter. The three of them coowned this entire peninsula and created a system of tenant run ranches. They owned the land and they set up the land, and they were lawyers so they came up with the creative names, a ranch, b ranch, c ranch, and they also came up with the pierce system, and then the alphabet there and eventually they run out of the na names and then you will have ranch names like south ranch, and wile cath rand cat ranch. Until the 20s and the 30s each ranch was run by a tenant family, and there were waves of immigrants that came into this area, and had experience running dairies, so they were often chosen as the people to run these rancheses there. A group from the azores who live mostly out here and still do. There is a group from ireland, also a big dairying landscape up here to the point on the north, and inland, more italianspeaking, pardon me, italian speaking swiss so you will have a name like jock mean jeacamini, and dole chini, and so names of that sort. Then the heirs started to sell off the chunks, and not to outside world, but to the en na tenant family, and so it is the American Dream stories, you work hards a tenant and then you will become the land owner, and very much that story. Many of the families who owned the ranches when the park was created have been there in some of that are still there have been there five or six generations which for california is pretty darnout. Back east or in europe, 150 years is knot, but onothing, bu unusual. Around the same time of the conversion from the shafters owning the shafter family owning the land to the tenant families owning it, most of the dairies are converted from producing butter and cheese shipped by schooner to e krcreating liquidk and shipping it by truck. The roads got improved around the same time, and refrigeration improved and now liquid milk is much more possible. The dairies are exftensive, and this is the sea ranch out on the peninsula and this is the one further up, and there is a loft buildings and impacts, and this is not a wilderness is the point that i am trying to the make. And buildings and fence, and land use going on here. With a dairy, cows need to be milked twice a day, and every day, day in, day out. They dont take vacations or weekends, so the cows are coming back to the barns twice a day and a lot of heavy impact around the barns as far as the environmental impact, and not pristine space or wilderness, and yet it was seen as a great place to fut National Seashore in the 1960s. It was a period of time for the people for Parks Movement across the nation. The national pa service was specifically looking for places to krcreate new parks that were close to urban areas and provide specifically beach access. So this is what the focus was. Both back east you will have places like cape cod, Cape Hatteras and all of these National Seashore, and the great shores on the great lake, and the seashores here including point reyes. The way that the park was set up initially was expressively designed to ak kccommodate the still operating ranches. At that time, there were 25 either dairy or beef ranches operating on the peninsula within the boundaries of the seashore. Trying to keep tem in place was both a political es necessary, the locals never would have gone along with the park idea fit were going to change their local economy as much as taking out 25 ranches, and it would have had a huge impact. But also, if you are reading through the hearings and the other sort of the discussion that is go g ing on about the p, there is a real appreciation of the scenic quality of the pastural landscape, and someone coming out from San Francisco seeing the cows and the beautiful pastures is part of the esthetic experience, so that is being touted as one of the strong points of this place. But, as you may hopefully are starting to get from the lecture today, the park service is when it comes to preservation, it is not a neutral actor. It has built into the agency from the early history a really strong sense of what a National Park is supposed to be like. Those early National Parks are shaping that. So places like yosemite are like the model of how the parks are going to be set sup and managed. In places that have working landscapes like point reyes, they dont fit in as well. I am not sure if you can read it, but i put in a quote from a park historian on the slide. It says, given the persistence of an cecses tral ideas of thos who are too stubborn not the change them. So this is the way we manage them to keep them as unchanging natural scenery that are places with the working lands and the people working on them and livestock moving around in them dont fit it very well. And one of the things that is m important to understand about the Park Services again when it is first being set up, it is not a focus on the natural resources. Ecology as a science does not exist yet in 1916 or barely starting to exist. It is really a focus on the scenery and not on the science. Thats followed through until recently in the park service. So, this can sort of help us to understand some of, sometimes cont contradictory differences of between what the agency sort of says they are wanting to do, and what the actual outcomes on the management of the landscape can be, a and this is what i found on the research of point reyes. Quick overview of some of the things that happened there and through the management policies and the actions, the park service has been slowly editing out a lot of the Human History of this place either physically through removing buildings. Roughly half of the buildings and other structures in place in 1962 are gone now. And again, it is not necessarily that they were the best things on earth, but they have been either removed or torn down and sometimes burned for fire training, and the idea that we should push the landscape to being more natural looking, and to have few cher structure nits and structures in it, and it is not the formal policy, but it is the way it goes. And when i tried to do from the count, and the actual maps and building, and how many there in 1962 and how many today, and the park service was surprise d tha as many have disappeared as have. It is not that they are conscious of the changes that they are causing over time, but that these things are happening sort of slowly through the ideas about what management should be driving for. There is far fewer ranches in place in operation now where we went from 25 in 1962, and there is currently 11. Six dare ris and fiar dairie that are ranches. And some of the ranches are being taken care of and some of the still operating ones are being lived in. Some of the ones that are not lived in are being taken care of and pardon me, i am off like the pierce ranch which is a walkthrough exhibit. The buildings, and they have spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fixing up the buildings with the Historic Preservation approapriate methodology and used the right kinds of nails for the era it was built and the right technology for fixing them. It is actually the ranch that is in the best shape in the park physically, but you may be able to see that there is little plaques and a path that visitors can walk around and look at the buildings and sort of peer at them and read about them, but nobody lives there except for the main house which is housing park service staff. Other ranches that have where the residents have either moved out on their own or evicted are not necessarily taking care of very well. This is the dranch out near drakes beach and the main victorian house dating back to the 1880s and the photograph of the same spot from the 1950s when you cant see it very well from this distance, but there is a beautiful roses on each side, and everything is in perfect shape. Many of the neighbors described to me that back in the day, the dranch was the prettiest ranch on the point, and it is really just a showcase. You see that now it has been sitting empty for about ten years. A bunch of the windows are broken and this is an area incredibly foggy and windy and salt from the ocean, and a lot of the materials will deteriorate quickly. The creamery which dated from the 1880s which is across the way from the building collapsed a few years ago and now sort of taken away. The area that is also the creation of the designated wi wilderness and making this lived in place into sort of the wild pristine nature, and that is coming complete with the wildlife, and these are the tuley elk that had lived on the points reyes peninsula in the 1800s and before and they had been hunted out of the area by about the 1850s and even before the dairies started to move in, and they were gone from the are region until they were reintroduced in 1978. They have since proliferated and the herd s as are doing well. There is a lack of large predators in what would have been a natural, and im putting the natural in air quotes in a natural me, wok managed landscape. You would have had burns regularly and grizzly bears and mountain lines to pick off the elk to to keep the population in check, and hunted by the mewok and right now, no hunting or predators. So there is nothing to control the population, and it is booming. It is taking a few dips in the recent years, because of the drought, but it is a really big management question of what do we do to manage the animals . They have talked about using contraception of which i dont want the to know the details of or possibly moving them out to another park. It is a place masquerading as being wild and natural, and yet it is deeply managed. They cant just leave the elk alone and leave it untouched, because there a need to keep, keep trying to shape this place to make it look like sort of the iconic nature that we all expect when we arrive in a park. What little historical evidence there is at port reyes, check out the Visitor Center at drakes beach, because there is very little historical material interpreted for the visitors, and what there is focused on sir Frances Drake who landed for about a week when his ship was blown off course in what the 0 1400s sometime. The more recent past in the terms of the ranches and the further past of the mewoks is the interpretation of this place, and what is more striking is that i will wrap up with this, is that it is understandable that the visitors dont know the history of the place, because it is not interpreted by the park service, and even the park managers dont remember or have any idea of what the old history was or what was there before they showed up. Park management, staff like any other job, they have turnover, right . So someone might work there for five years and move on to another park, and the people who come in, dont have a lot of material to read on the history of the place and so gradually the memory of what was there fades away. They dont interact very much, the staff and the ranchers who still live within the seashore, and ever since i started and i have been researching this place since the late 1990s and when people visit the seashore for the first time, there are often questions of why are there cows here or ranches . Ran ranches dot no seem like they belong in the National Park, because again, we bring our own ideas of what a National Park is supposed to be and we tont remember cows in yosemite or yell rowstone or some of the Big International iconic parks. So it is a selfreplicating cycle of the people question the original residence of the park, and they dont know the story of how they got there, and so then, sort of advocating for them to be moved out a. Number of lawsuits in the recent years to try to more actively push some of the last remaining residents out of the park. So one of the things with the closing of the image of the p pastural landscape, and even what we think of Natural Landscapes have histories that is often invisible to us as a viewer. These places were shaped by other peoples lives whether it is native americans or more recent settlers like the ranchers at port reyes, and will is a need to have if not a formal recognition of the landscape at least a respect for the ways in which their work has literally made these places. The are reason that there are grassy fields out there at port reyes is because of the mewok burning for hundreds of thousands of years and cattle ranching has been taking there. If you take cattle off or the burning off, and just like with the yosemite with the conaifers moving in, they would not be Natural Landscapes, but perceived landscapes. And so people in this area is not valuing the contribution to the place. So that is the tepd of my lecture today. I wondered if you guys have any questions that i could answer . Can you ask that again . What got you interested in port reyes in the first place . Oh, the question is what got me interested in port reyes in the first place. I got very interested, and i come from the background as a biologist as an undergraduate and that is my College Degree if biology from ucberkeley, and i thought that my parents are both biologists, and i thought that i would be a biologist, but i started to get interested in the social and the culturals aspect of how we think of the natural world. I realized that i was not interested in taking the frog apart, but thinking of how we think of the frogs or why they are important, et cetera. So i started to get more involved in the social sciences aspects of the natural landsc e landscapes and specifically, i took a class at ucberkeley in the graduate program from a law professor named joe sacks who was teaching a class on preservation law, and what was unusual is that he spent half of the semester talking about the natural preservation, and National Parks and endangered e specie, and about wild erness, and then the rest of the other half of the semester, we talked about cultural preservations, museum, communities like the amish trying to protect their sense of cultural identity and working landscapes like point reyes. I started to realize how similar the impulses of preservation are on the natural and the cultural side, and soy got really interested in the places where theym come together. To me a that is what the National Parks are, and they are the odd natural and cultural construct, but we tend to p pretend that the cultural is not there and only see them now. And point reyes, because it is a lived in National Park, it is unusual in the United States today, and there are some, and probably 50 or 60 that have some kind of land use and or residents living in the park, but out of 400someodd National Parks it is not that many. So it was conveniently located nearby and as i moved from the graduate student at berkeley and getting a job here at sonoma state, it was still conveniently nearby, and so the mixture of natural and cultural which is intriguing to try to understand how to move from a fairly corporateized landscape divided from ranches and utilized in economic use to something that is sort of recreated as pristine nature and understanding that transformation. So it is a perfect case study for seeing the change over time. Other questions about preservation or parks . In the chapter that we read for today, you talk about how those in power in society influence what is value and what is preserved. I am wondering what you think about the current president ial administration and the impact that it might have on the place like point reyes and other places . That is an excellent question, and i have no idea. I have been asked this question many times since the election in november, and it is hard to say. Some people would presume that the new administration is more open to either privatizing the public lands, and the guy that he has appointed zinke i believe is his name as the secretary of the interior is not an advocate for the privatization of public lands, so it seems that it is not on the table. There might be more openness to this working landscape to the recognizing that you can have economic uses of land and Environmental Protection at the same time. That they dont have to be oppositional. That said, the new administration does not seem to be particularly supportive of the Environmental Concerns at all. So that is where it is a wild card i think at this point in terms of how to affect management on the ground, and another interesting factor that is unique to the park service and more current day park Service Rather than the history of the park service is that it is that each individual park is kr created by a separate act of congress, and they are not sort of, and there is no blanket auth authority over all of them. There is some guidelines that the park service has as the national policy, but each individual superintendent of the park, and yosemite and ye yellowstone and each superintendent has a lot of latitude of how to manage the the place. So there is a wide discretion that they have, and so a real variation in terms of how parks are managed. I have often used a comparison of port reyes to another park in ohio called cuyahoga valley National Park and it was National Recreational area where the place of the current superintendent has been interested in the last 15 to 20 years and bringing agricultural back to the park after a few convictions in the 1970s and it has come up with interesting models for possibly doing that, and creating sort of new long term leases for agriculturists who will commit to being organic, to having a fairly small Scale Production for not minding tourists coming by and not doing what they have done, and there is a new model for encouraging agriculture, and you would think that it is a national agency, and if it is happening in one place, it would happen in another. Until fairly rekrecently, it ha been happening in port reyes, and there is a deemphasis of the natural landscape and more of the natural scenery, and so there is a lack of consistency across parks which meant that a new administration at the National Level does not actually change very u much at the each park level, because those superintendents have a lot of discretion to either do their own thing, and maybe go to a different direction than the National Level is going. So it is a long way of saying, i dont know, but time will tell. Anything else . All right then. Lets wrap up the lecture for today and take a break and we will do our discussion of the readings afterwards. Thank you so much. Cspans history landmark cases beginning february 26th with the beginning of a look at mcculloch versus maryland. We will have special guests joining us to discuss. Watch landmark cases live monday february 26th at 9 00 p. M. On cspan, cspan. Org or lis wten wh the cspan radio app. You can purchase the companion book with free shndling for Free Shipping and handling for 8. 95. And make sure that you go to our sbe active series on the constitution. American history tv is on cspan3 every weekend featuring museum tours and archival lectures. This is a clip from a recent program. You had some whites who came in, didnt realize that when you used the nword towards a black, you could have serious problem, and some of them did that. So to a army saw that it had a problem. It had to do something. Indeed they did. What they found out is that only about 2 of the officers in vietnam were africanamericans. During the first part of that war, say 65 or 66, 25 to 26 of the kias were africanamericans. That became a problem. And the word cannon fodder of the africanamericans used as cannon fodder, and i will tell you that is not the situation. What it was, was that africanamericans generally prefer and went to the combat arms. Because all rank came down first to the the combat arms, and so you had a chance to make the rank fast, and you did it there, and second, those were the elite units of the ar army my at that yes, a number of us were gung ho and predominant in to a airborne unit, and the other reason is that we wanted the chance to prove that we were good and that we would fight for our country, and we did. The downside of it was when it was time to give out the medals, that is when i began to get into trouble. Blacks were not getting the medals. And that is one of the issues with my captain when i am only an e4 now, and im confronting as diplomatically as i could a captain as to why there were no blacks getting medals. And all of the medals were given to the white, and i guess that my tone accused him and so i asked the white ncos why the bla blacks were not getting medals, and they were saying, we recommended this guy for the bronze star and the sill are ver star and nothing became of it. So that is the basis of my confrontation. With the captain and i requested his permission to go to the i. G. Once again, you just dont do that. You are saying that you have no faith in his leadership and this is when i began to have my problems. You can watch this and other history programs on our website where all of the videos are archived. Go to cspan. Org history. Cspan is in lynchburg, virginia, learning about local history. Next we go into his r or theic